Body, house and city: The intertwinings of embodiment, inhabitation and civilization

Abstract

The house, body and city do not so much occupy space and time as generate them. It is only as inhabiting, embodied beings that we find ac- cess to a world. The house, body and city are the places where we are born or reborn and from which we step out into a larger world. One of the most interesting challenges of our time is to intertwine these three primordial terms, to rekindle their long forgotten interrelationship, to reexperience their underlying unity anew in modern thought and in modern architectural practice. This article provides a spiritual meditation, apart from the obvious phenomenological take, on how we come to inhabit the world. Starting with the "body", the author reflects on how the human body is a "visual source of vision", i.e. it is at once visible and the source of vision. To inhabit something would then mean to extend one's body into the place where one is residing or doing work or the like. He uses the inhabitation logic to talk about buildings as QUASI-BODIES. Page 219 has a statement on DWELLING which can be of use.